The Moz Blog

Why Visitor Analytics Aren't Enough for Modern Marketers

For the first two decades of the web, the vast majority of those performing web marketing tasks used visitor analytics tools (from log files and hit counters all the way up to today's full-featured visitor analytics tools) to do their jobs. We'd look at how many visits came in, where they were coming from, and what pages they saw, and that was enough.

The key challenges marketers face usually fall into one of three buckets:

Measuring & reporting (and the analysis of those reports)

Uncovering problem issues

Identifying areas of opportunity

If we visualize these challenges, we can see the missing holes compared to the features of visitor analytics software:

(note: this graphic isn't meant to be an exhaustive list of metrics or of tools, and there's plenty of overlap, e.g. Moz Analytics and Raven both track visit data, Mixpanel and Kiss Metrics both measure revenue and usage, etc)

It's been my experience that most of the great web marketing teams have access to several tools that fill in the gaps on both sides of what visitor analytics provide. These marketers analyze how they're doing in the leading indicator metrics against the competition, and follow that methodology (as far as possible) down to marketing KPIs, and finally business metrics.

Why does this matter so much?

Because a competitive web marketing world means we have less room for failure over a long period of time. If a tactic or channel isn't succeeding, we have to know whether that's because it's a bad channel, or whether we're just bad at it. Competitive comparisons are critical to getting that analysis right.

If your key competitors are kicking butt on Pinterest, but your CMO doesn't "believe" in the channel, you need data to make the case. Likewise, if you're attracting lots of converting visitors through Pinterest, but the lifetime value of those customers is 1/10th that of your email list based on your recitivism and amplification data, you need to know that, too. Google Analytics is great, but it can't give you the answer to either of those questions, no matter how you customize it.

Obviously, I'm biased. Moz makes marketing software that's focused on comparing your leading indicator metrics against your competition's (go read Matt's Field Guide to Moz Analytics if you're curious about the details). We have a vested interest in marketers feeling the need for this type of data. But the truth is that we built software to help solve that problem because I/we believe it's such an important part of the story.

Visitor analytics like Google Analytics, Omniture, and Webtrends aren't going anywhere. They're still a huge part of what we need to do in our jobs. But alone, they're not enough.

We need to see how the competitive landscape is trending, and how our efforts compare. We need to see how channels perform beyond simple conversion and sales tracking. There's no single piece of software that does all of this in one place, and I strongly doubt there will be. Instead, I believe the future will have marketers on the organic side doing what our brethren in paid channels do - visiting several sources, aggregating information, and making smart decisions based on the nuance their collective brain power can help deduce.

35 Comments

Why doesn't one software do it all? I currently visit multiple software sites with multiple logins everyday generate needed reports/metrics. I would gladly give me left arm (or at least a few fingers) to have one login on one site that gives me all the data as I please.

I didn't see conductor in the list. What would be your personal opinion of their software?

I think the reason is that it's really, really hard to be good at any one of those sections, and it takes a lot of focus and concentration (and ongoing development) just to keep up with the features people need in your target area. Hubspot is probably the closest to providing all three today, but I think even they have experienced the challenges of trying to be everything to everyone, and are more focused on the lead tracking/scoring/marketing automation part of the funnel as a result.

And yeah - I didn't list every software provider. Conductor, Brightedge, GinzaMetrics, RankAbove, Covario, and many more are in the enterprise space for SEO specifically.

I really like their "account homepage". That page allows me to see summary data from ALL of my websites on one screen. And, I can customize what metrics appears on that page for all of my sites.

I can see TODAY's data (visitors, bounce rate, goals, etc)... and I can see graphs of TRENDING data for each site. Really valuable. One glance I can see what's happening today on all of my sites and if anything is going wild or tanking over time. A business owner's overview.

For the first two decades of the web, the vast majority of those performing web marketing tasks used visitor analytics tools

Yes, and from what I have seen, the first two decades of analytics has focused on a single site reporting at the basic data level.... but so many of us now have complex businesses that we need multi-site reporting of summary data and trending data. And that is just for the business owner.

Many businesses also have specialized teams who do things such as social, content creation, PPC, etc. on multiple websites. So, in addition to the "business owners overview", I can see a need for a PPC manager overview, a social manager overview, etc. (that update automatically every few minutes).

There are so many different types of businesses with different performance indicators that it might be hard to make a single overview model that will work for all types of businesses and even hybrid businesses.

I can imagine a business knowing what these manger overviews should look like but needed a programmer or api access to assemble them. Others might benefit from consultations to identify the data presentation that would bring them the greatest benefit.

Great post, Rand. I totally agree with your comment that the future of organic marketers is "visiting several sources, aggregating information, and making smart decisions based on the nuance their collective brain power can help deduce." We use several ourselves... still, it would be nice, and maybe even worth a couple of fingers as Brian mentioned, to have a piece of software that did it all. Maybe this is in another post, and I apologize if so, but any thoughts on software groupings that work particularly well together for gathering data?

Sure , with the explanations in this post, I agree that visitor analytics alone are not enough for modern marketing. These tools need to be supported by others that can help marketers make more vital decisions that would see that the marketers are in better control of the dynamics of the business.

Agree! What Google Analytics provides to social media marketers is general information. All the information is kind of stay on the surface instead of going deep. Knowing how many visitors you have, where are they from wont help a lot, unless you have analytical data.

Visitor analytics can at least signal brand awareness; if more people are visiting your site, then they are at least familiar with your brand. This concept is same in other forms of advertisements as well; for example, a TV advert does not convince each and every person who sees the advert to buy your product. But it at least makes them aware of your brand. Brand awareness may lead to sales in future.

Good article Rand! I think marketers have always wanted access to this data, but with the age of internet they finally have access to it. Clicks, Likes, Shares, Views etc... all translate into tangible data that marketers never had. Until now most info gathered was just estimations. This info is a new tool to any marketer to use. I would love to see how the future for marketing changes with access to such tools. The future is exciting...

Great post! I have run into the Pinterest situation you wrote about for many of the social media sites because people will see that they are getting referrals from those sites, but not many conversions so they don't see the point.

How do you suggest kindly showing the importance of some sites that do have a lot of referrals and conversions without being too in their face about it?

Pinterest specifically doesn't take much time right? I mean, most businesses are sharing images that they are creating already-so we're talking about minutes per day right?

If you assume some level of expense for the time, then compare that to what owners are often paying for brand building marketing and name recognition, I think you can get somewhere.

Frankly, I don't think it's a really easy sell-but there is an element of conversions that don't fit into any one easy funnel-namely those searches for the company name itself. Where do they normally count those as coming from?

Nice post on a good topic Rand. I do use, raventools and GA as my primary source for analytics, though i have found google analytics not to be 100% accurate. Sometimes it shows me less goal completion and conversion on my analytics report.

So i would like to kow from you, do you get 100% accurate data from google analytics?

I wished there was an "Uber" Analytics. Frankly, the solutions landscape is too fragmented, and it makes a marketer's job more difficult, because many have overlapping features. And new ones are coming on the scene, with "mobile analytics" as the hot analytics du jour. I don't recall seeing too much M&A in this segment, but I suspect it's probably around the corner.

To me Moz Analytics + Google Analytics + Kissmetrics is great combination for overall data analysis (atleast for initial and mid stage). Then crazyegg + vwo for further AB testing and analysis can be effective. Correct me if i am wrong.

How can you write such a small post on a topic like this. If I would try, it would be lot of more words and 50% wouldn't read it to the end. I am usually drifting away on SEO and Marketing topics.... :)

I've been noticing that people in our field have so much to read that it's better to tell the story and message as efficiently as possible. Otherwise, I see folks skimming and not really grasping the takeaways.

Interesting. I've been noticing that a lot of times while the article's content is great, the real nuts and bolts end up in the comments section. This is because people get in and ask the questions that the author either forgot or didn't think to address and all of the sudden the blog post becomes more actionable based on comment answers/responses. Of course sometimes comments are shallow and simply congratulatory but still I've been training myself more and more to be sure and read all of the comments, especially comments responded to by the original author.

Anyway just thought it was relevant to the "how much are we reading" discussion..

Thanks Rand for acknowledging the brutal reality of information overload. There gazillions of content created every day by marketing experts and gurus (thanks to all the Google animals) and I've having a difficult time keeping up.

I detest videos without transcription the most! I just don't have time to sit through 30 minutes of video, only to gain 1-2 insights that are worthy of my time.

I use a program called Springmetrics which is a live feed from my site and the dashboard is great. Covers 7 metrics that are crucial in identifying problems early, conversions,visits,conversion rate,returning visits,TOS,Revenue, and Revenue/Conv. I like the post- Thanks Rand

The more data you can get your hands on the better! Provided you don't lose the forest for the trees that it...People respond to numbers and the more hard data you can give someone to back up your point the more confident they will be in your assessment of the situtation and trust your recommendations for the future.

this fanstatic post for the marketer which help to improve his knowledge about the today market and as well as you define the tools and fetures is very nice and it's very help ful for the internet marketing of any site.